The paper investigates how small lexical changes in prompts can cause large performance swings in large language models. Using a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants, the authors uncover a scaling law linking higher average task performance to lower variance and greater robustness. They identify domain-specific terminology and explicit action directives as key linguistic factors that stabilize prompts, and propose an automated Prompt-Refining Agent that reduces performance variance by 40.7% in code generation while maintaining or improving mean performance.
By Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
The paper investigates prompt minimization, aiming to reduce prompts to their smallest, most information-dense form without losing output fidelity. It argues that shorter prompts lower computational overhead and inference latency, especially when large contexts are unnecessarily included, and that longer prompts can harm LLM reasoning and accuracy. The authors propose three frameworks to identify minimal prompts and show that these often produce outputs comparable to longer versions, highlighting redundancy in the input space and opening new avenues for efficient prompt engineering.
By Marius F. R. Juston, Kevin A. Karim, Jonathan Gao, Kevin C. Li, Rudhi Bashambu
arXiv:2507. 09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior.
By MohammadReza Davari, Utkarsh Garg, Weixin Cai, Eugene Belilovsky
The paper introduces ramework, a blackbox prompt‑minimization framework that identifies the minimal subset of few‑shot prompts necessary for large language models (LLMs). In a case study, the framework reduces few‑shot exemplars by an average of 65.3% in character count while maintaining full propositional output fidelity, revealing that models tend to keep logical identifiers and constraint declarations while discarding natural language prose. The analysis further distinguishes between universal encoder and decoder models, offering insights into prompt compression and structural analysis.
By Ali Alfageeh, Rahul Gopinath, Amin Alipour
arXiv:2511. 19829v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prompt optimization has become a central mechanism for eliciting strong performance from LLMs, and recent work has made substantial progress by proposing diverse prompt evaluation metrics and optimization strategies.
By Ke Chen, Yifeng Wang, Hassan Almosapeeh, Haohan Wang
arXiv:2606. 08129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) differ in architecture, training data, and optimization procedures, yet they may still develop similar internal inference patterns.
By Siyu Lou, Yao Yan, Yuntian Chen, Quanshi Zhang
The paper argues that user feedback from real interactions is a valuable learning signal for Large Language Models (LLMs), contrary to recent claims that it is too noisy to use. By creating synthetic data with a clear ground truth and testing on naturalistic data, the authors show that revisions guided by user feedback fix targeted issues more often than baseline revisions. They further reveal that current evaluation methods bias against feedback‑driven improvements, as judges tend to overlook genuinely corrected responses and favor inferior baselines.
By Shachar Don-Yehiya, Leshem Choshen, Omri Abend
arXiv:2603. 03824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent \textit{evaluation awareness}.
By Maheep Chaudhary
arXiv:2604. 22027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the question is posed.
By Zhuonan Yang, Jacob Xiaochen Li, Francisco Piedrahita Velez, Eric Todd, David Bau, Michael L. Littman, Stephen H. Bach, Ellie Pavlick
arXiv:2606. 12117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.
By Selen Erkan, Bastian Boll, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu
arXiv:2608. 16627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language explanations (NLEs) are increasingly used as inputs, for example, as few-shot rationales that influence model behavior in in-context learning (ICL).
By Mahdi Dhaini, Adam Dejl, Juraj Vladika, Volkan \"Ozer, Barbara Plank, Gjergji Kasneci
The paper presents a prompt-based method for minimal-edit grammatical error correction (GEC) that reduces overcorrection in large language models (LLMs). It introduces taxonomy-based instructions, batch prompting to regularize overcorrection, and LLM-assisted prompt optimization, achieving an $F_{0.5}$ score of 78.32 on BEA-2019 with Gemini 3.1-Pro. This approach narrows the performance gap to fine-tuned models while avoiding their infrastructure demands.
By Kateryna Karpo, Artem Chernodub